Marin General Hospital building plan features fewer patient rooms, new parking scheme

Marin General Hospital in Greenbrae has been under public management for two years. The hospital, pictured in 2011, was managed by Sutter Health previously. On Tuesday, an arbitor ordered Sutter to pay the hosptial $21.5 million. (IJ photo/Frankie Frost)
Frankie Frost

The number of patient rooms planned for the new Marin General Hospital has been reduced, and the scheme for accommodating cars on the campus has been altered.

Under state law, Marin General Hospital has until 2030 to make its facilities earthquake safe. In November, Marin voters approved a $394 million general obligation bond measure to help pay for construction of a 300,000-square-foot hospital replacement building consisting of two wings, a new 100,000-square-foot ambulatory services building, and two new parking structures. The bond measure is expected to cover a majority but not all of the estimated $500 million needed to complete Marin General's building plan.

The plan was for the new hospital facilities to have 218 patient rooms, all of which would be private and contain one bed. Last week, however, the Marin Healthcare District board, which oversees the county's largest hospital, approved reducing that number to 174.

Jon Friedenberg, Marin General's chief administrative officer, said experts on in-patient bed demand in hospitals have been predicting for years that bed demand was going to decline nationally, and last year reality caught up with the forecast.

"In 2013, we really began to see a statistically significant reduction in patient bed demand play out nationally and locally," Friedenberg said.

He said after consulting with experts on the local market, hospital administrators decided to scale back.

Friedenberg said some of the new rooms will be licensed for two beds so in case of an emergency the hospital will be able to boost its capacity. He said the hospital will remain licensed for 235 beds.

Nurses at the hospital have complained recently about the long waits patients face when being admitted into the hospital from the emergency department. Hospital performance data supplied to the district board last week shows that the time it takes to move patients from the emergency department to a hospital bed exceeded the national benchmark by a considerable amount.

He said in the new hospital the number of intensive care unit beds will double and the size of the emergency department will increase significantly.

"So those wait times will come way, way down," Friedenberg said.

The district board also approved a significant change in the plan for new parking structures at the hospital. Plans to build a five-story parking garage containing 505 spaces adjacent to Bon Air Road have been scratched. Instead, the building plan for another parking garage, to be located against the northeast hillside, has been expanded from 416 spaces to 824 spaces.

"It's a way for us to meet the parking demands of the hospital without constructing a parking garage on Bon Air," Friedenberg said. "When we went through the review and comment process, we heard from some members of the community that they were concerned about the visual impact of the Bon Air parking structure."

There will be a net increase in the number of new parking spaces under the new plan, since 120 surface parking spaces that would have been eliminated by the Bon Air parking garage will remain.

Friedenberg said the cost of the total project won't change significantly since the change in the parking scheme will increase the cost while the reduction in rooms will reduce expenses.